Thoughts on Magic, COVID-19 & William Blake's Hope
Salutations, listeners and Glitch Bottle patrons. I’m sure so many thoughts cascade your consciousness during these times of the coronavirus pandemic. Thoughts like: Social distancing. Hand washing. That subtle refreshing of the news on your smartphone for the latest death and infection tally. Sanitizing your smartphone when you realize the places it’s been. Sanitizing everything: making antibiotics your new musk. Trying to streamline consistent food supply. Watching the empty, almost cavernous, grocery store aisles stare back at you with an almost existential, fluorescent-lit face saying: what are you going to do now, human?” That pit in your stomach. Remembering Nietzsche when he says: “if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you…” then suddenly thinking you are tripping into the abyss itself, caught up in a global gravity of panic and cross contamination which you cannot escape, outrun or shield yourself from. And there’s that pale, empty face of the grocery aisle saying: what are you going to do now, human?”
Well, let me tell you what we are going to do now, listeners. Amid the plague, amid COVID-19, amid the anxiety and the panic and the second guessing and the litany of other things we could let subsume us….here, right here we will plant our flag, on the esoteric hill of stability and ritual. And we will breathe. *inhale* And we will make our magic, our rituals and our practices even better, more strange and more beautiful.
Of course you should try and limit spending time in large gatherings, you should wash your hands, you should cover your cough, and if you can stay home from work, you should do that. You should take each day one day at a time, and you should find time to take care of yourself physically, and mentally with breaks away from the news and neurosis. You should do it all.
But, you should not let these daily necessities blot out the sun of your own practice and rituals and engagement with the spirits, in whatever capacity you practice. Your esoteric engagements are vital, they are an esoteric-immunological buttressing of your own stability.
If you’re worried and anxious, light the incense! Swing the censer, and offer these feelings to the spirits, for mercurial transformation of your energies.
If you feel anxious because you don’t know what will happen next...remember that the uncertainty of life, the element of entropy and chaos, is always pirouetting around our kinetic movements, embedding itself in the shadowy pauses between our thoughts, it’s always the case. We are, in many senses, one moment away, always, from coming face to face with the rapacious legions of fate and chance. And COVIS-19 is another element in a giant ocean we’ve been swimming in our entire lives.
This is why the Art and Science of Magic and esoteric engagement is so important, for you! It doesn’t matter if it’s not perfect when you do it, or you do it with a thousand other cares surrounding you, the point is that you are doing it: that you are consciously, actively and consistently staring your cares and concerns in the face, acknowledging them, and allowing them to pass, knowing something will always be there to capture your attention...but it is the magician themselves who know how to surf the waves of chance and guide one’s practice and energies to worthy goals.
Sometimes we need to remind ourselves that this is what magic is: magic is about not accepting our floating in an ocean of fatalism, but it is instead about surfing and moving through the esoteric currents, sailing on the best journey we could ever imagine. And this journey is what matters.
Please don’t take my word for it. Amid the modern plague, COVID-19, amid the anxiety and fretting, let’s hear from a visionary artist, poet and engraver, Wiliam Blake, who became deathly ill in 1825, and continued to work on and on and on despite the illness, my delving his gnostic and esoteric spade deep into what he called the realm of the Imagination, by which he means the True Arte and Science of Creative Gnosis. In a letter to George Cumberland, on April 12, 1827, William Blake writes about facing death and sickness with the armor of Art, saying:
'I have been very near the gates of death, and have returned very weak and an old man, feeble and tottering, but not in the spirit and life, not in the real man, the imagination, which liveth for ever.
Today, as magicians, we may call this realm of perfect Imagination, or Pure Art and Science and illumination of creativity many things, but for Blake, he called this realm Jerusalem, the celestial city of pure pregnant fields of potentiality. And he contrasts this power of creative introspection, this Jerusalem, to the desolate city of Babylon: or humans, and rigid morality and constipated structure. In one of his poems, Blake urges us, listeners, to never forsake our work in the Arte & Science, in whatever valences we may orbit and work! To never forsake Jerusalem for the worries and anxieties and fretting of Babylon, when he writes:
O what is Life & what is Man. O what is Death? Wherefore
Are you my Children, natives in the Grave to where I go?
Or are you born to feed the hungry ravenings of Destruction,
To be the sport of Accident! to waste in Wrath & Love, a weary
Life, in brooding cares & anxious labours, that prove but chaff.
O Jerusalem Jerusalem I have forsaken thy Courts
Thy Pillars of ivory & gold: thy Curtains of silk & fine
Linen: thy Pavements of precious stones: thy Walls of pearl
And gold, thy Gates of Thanksgiving thy Windows of Praise:
Thy Clouds of Blessing; thy Cherubims of Tender-mercy
Stretching their Wings sublime over the Little-ones of Albion
O Human Imagination O Divine Body I have Crucified
I have turned my back upon thee into the Wastes of Moral Law:
There Babylon is builded in the Waste, founded in Human desolation…
You, listeners, are magicians, you are royalty, and as William Blake reminds us, your esoteric palace is built out of stones of moments, stones of ritualistic moments stacked ontop of one another in joy in the moment. That is your palace. It does not matter how many years we practice magic, what matters is that magic is something you are either doing, or you are not.
So! Swing the censer! Recite the words, listeners! Circumambulate the circle! Intone the names. Raise the ceremonial sword, gently call to the spirits orbiting in unseen multitudes around you. We know the world can be rough. We know every moment could be our last. And *that* is why we are magicians: to surf the waves of fate, to never forsake the realm of the Highest Arte & Science, to help others with rituals, requests and petitions, and to always raise our shimmering, multidimensional banners high, to cast our fears on the altar and chant the joyous hymns to those came before us, and those who watch us still, to rejoice in the moments *we* are given to prove ourselves worthy, in every moment.
This is Alexander Eth, sending you blessings, and joy, as we gather and chant under the magical canopy of our magical Arts.